ALEPG is the portuguese national linguistic atlas project that had its beginning in 1970 under Lindley Cintra's direction. The linguistic enquiries began in 1974 after the linguistic questionnaire's publication. This questionnaire is essentialy lexical of onomasiological base. In the very beginning it included about 3.500 questions (but since 1990 it was reduced to 2.000 in order to increase the rhythm of the interviews and, at the same time, to guarentee the project completion). Until 1990, 70 interviews were accomplished using the original questionnaire; from then on all the interviews were accomplished using the reduced questionnaire.

The 83 interviews accomplished between 1994-1997 received a special funding from the Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica (JNICT) and Instituto Camões through the Lusitânia Program (PLUS/C/LIN/800/93) of; the former enquiries received fundings from Instituto de Alta Cultura (IAC) and from Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica (INIC).

The entire net includes 212 points: 176 in the portuguese continental teritory; 24 in the two insular archipels (7 in Madeira and 17 in Azores); 12 in Spain - border points.

The main goal of this project is to study linguistic variation and linguistic varieties in the Portuguese territory.

As the inquiring/recording task is concluded, the phonetic transcription of the collected data and its introduction in a computerized database will be the team task for the next years.

For a better preservation of the recorded raw data (about 4.500 hours of speech recording) a digital safeguard copy has been done thanks to a FCT's (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) specific programmatic funding.